Weaver

We are an experienced team of designers and developers, focusing on experience, design, and future.
Everything we do has something in common: being made to astound, to uncover and release new possibilities, and to delight.
Three of us studied Multimedia Design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design, one Software Architecture and HCI and the Hasso-Plattner Institute Potsdam.
Our focus in all projects lies on interactivity and cutting-edge graphics - that is how we found together in this team constellation, trying to go new ways and novel interaction methods.

Weaver is a touch-enabled game which is designed to entertain families while taking advantage of large touch screens. Each player controls a spider and builds a spider web around leaves, twigs, and other objects on the screen to catch approaching insects and to collect points. The game stands out by its easy to learn and fun to play multiplayer gaming in combination with next-gen mobile graphics and convincing physical simulation of the spider web and insect behaviour.

The game and the whole development process – from creating the game concept to writing the code – was especially adjusted to Lenovo's All-In-One Horizon 27. In less than two month part-time, we managed to put our ideas for gameplay, vision and technology from concept to completion.

In Weaver each player controls a spider with their fingers to build a web around fixed objects in the scene. Approaching insects might become entangled in the player's web. While the insects are caught, they can and should be eaten as soon as possible, otherwise they might free themselves, destroy parts of the web and fly away. Every eaten insect increases the number of points for the player. The player with the highest score wins the game. The number of players is only limited by the device size and touchpoint count - the gameplay allows for an unlimited amount of players!

Players can choose between three distinct levels, all of them with next-gen mobile graphics, but different in their appearance. The first level is a scene in woods, where the players weave webs between leaves and twigs. The second scene shows a snow-white landscape with some snowbound juniper berries, while the third one is a scene of an attic with clothesline, chairs, and nails to fix the web in the game.

Weaver was developed using Unity3D. All levels, models and other game assets were created using Autodesk 3ds max, Autodesk Maya and Cinema 4D. Due to the very tight time constraints, a lot of modelling tricks came to the rescue (scattering fruits and leaves, using metaballs for snow, animating using CAT, ...).
Also, a lot of processes had to work in parallel, so we used the FBX file format to quickly iterate on models and levels. The initial versions were already used in Unity for programming while the final models were still being developed until the very end. Look & Shading development helped us to reach a high graphical quality, even with all the simulations and effects going on.

Weaver was presented at FMX 2014, SIGGRAPH 2014, push.conference 2014, PLAy14 and others. Even as students, we managed to push the game to the point where it is now - released on all major mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Windows RT). More info can be found at http://prefrontalcortex.de/weaver/

The video shows gameplay only - everything that can be seen is actual footage. Up to 10 players can assemble around the table and play with or against each other.

People's Choice Awards

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To vote, simply select the orange "Vote for entry" button above. You will be asked to add a score and a small comment. More information can be found on the Category and the Prize pages.

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